


This House is Falling Apart

by KateHunter



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-04
Updated: 2017-02-04
Packaged: 2018-09-21 20:53:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,550
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9565973
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KateHunter/pseuds/KateHunter
Summary: A house party is never just a house party. There is always work, always heroics, always someone else to save. Stiles wondered when his life started needing to be saved from himself.Post Season 3, expect Alison isn't dead.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [fridaygrimm](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fridaygrimm/gifts).



> Inspired by Anna Sun by Walk The Moon

Stiles was terrified. This was their last party together. You could even call it their first party together. Saving Beacon Hills from whatever supernatural threat they had penciled into the calendar didn’t leave much room for a social life. But Danny had organised a party and told the four of them to show up under punishment of a long drawn out death. So here they were in an old station wagon half way out of town. 

Scott was trying to concentrate on the road but the da-dum of Stiles heartbeat behind him was making him tighten his hands on the steering wheel.  
Alison and Lydia were talking excitedly about the summer ahead of them, the trip the four of them were taking to New York to house sit for one of the Argent’s family friends. Lydia liked to joke that it was the parents dropping Stiles off for school in the city before they scatted themselves across New England. Alison already had a list of activities for them to accomplish. 

“Stiles, we’re gonna be there soon. Remember the plan?” 

Stiles was trying to absentmindedly stare out the window, trying to ignore the fact that Lydia’s hand was just inches from his. Hand holding while running from death was just another Thursday but holding hands with Lydia Martin in the back of a station wagon on the way to a high school party was what Stiles dreams were made of. He was pretty sure he had this exact dream. The four of them: alive, safe, together, driving off into the sunset. 

“Stiles!” Lydia had grabbed his shoulder and he was jolted out of his forced absentmindedness. “The plan. Do you remember it?” 

Stiles stared at Lydia for a second. Her hair was just a touch too dark to glow in the moonlight but it still illuminated her through the windows. Say something, dammit. Anything. 

“Yeah, yeah I remember the plan. I got this.” 

Alison laughed. “Yeah Stiles, you got this.” 

A party would never just be a party. There was always a plan, always work to be done. Always someone else’s life to be saved. Stiles wondered when his life started needing to be saved. It wasn’t when Scott got turned, or when Lydia’s powers surfaced. Not when Derek and Peter and even Cora threatened him daily. Dying for his father and coming back from it, turning into a thousand year old bad guy couldn’t shake him. It wasn’t the precarious life and death balance they dealt with, that Stiles could handle. It was like he was born to do this, with these people.  
Stiles just couldn’t figure when those times had become the only times it felt like his heart was still beating. Nothing like nighttime car rides with friends to make a boy realise something was wrong. Stiles looked at the lights in the distance, the house Danny was hosting the party at. He turned to look at the long line of headlights behind them, smiling a little at the fact that Scott McCall was leading them all. Like always. 

Scott made sure to park somewhere they wouldn’t get parked in: a quick getaway was one of the lessons it took longest to learn. Lydia was looking up at the mansion the loomed over them. Her hand curled around Alison’s as the two of them walked up into it. Stiles stilled watching his friends, strong and confident and brave. The giant door and the stairs that rolled out of it seemed to be a mouth swallowing them up. In some half-hearted attempt to humour himself Stiles likened it to entering the adulthood everyone was suddenly telling him he was in. 

Scott threw his arm around Alison’s shoulders as he caught up to the girls. It was a sight, the three of them physically connected. Stiles was sure if he could see auras or energies or souls he’d be able to see Scott’s dark red flowing into Alison’s forest green then together all tangled up with Lydia’s deep and beautiful blue. The three colours mixing more the longer they stayed connected. Stiles looked down at his hands and tried to imagine what colour covered him. The only thing he could see was grey and black swirls moving over his skin. He watched his friends disappear into the mansion, wanting to follow them. The deep beat of the dance music Danny had chosen made the building feel like it was a beating heart, and the strobe lights flashing and moving across the windows made Stiles think of the search lights that had looked for him so many times. 

The silhouette of the three of them stuck in Stiles’ mind as he followed their path up the stairs. Stiles’ hesitated at the doorway, the lights inside didn’t reach him and he wanted to stay hidden in the shadows. Scott, Alison and Lydia were already in the middle of the crowd moving through the people, the girls brushing off unwanted touches. Stiles felt a bubble of anger in his chest when some unknown man reached out to touch Lydia. She expertly evaded anymore of his touch and looked back, seemingly searching for Stiles. Stiles stepped out of the shadows when it looked like Lydia was about to leave the safety net of Alison and Scott, he didn’t want her out in the open. The danger was everything and nothing. The danger used to be him. Lydia turned back and looked straight at him. In these moving lights, in a sea of moving bodies, the beat of the music seemingly moving the air around them she was the stillest point in all of it. Something propelled him back to that day in his bedroom. Red string strung across words that he struggled to make sense of. Red string wrapped around her fingers. Red string connecting them. In his more fanciful moods he might imagine the distance between the now was filled with that same red string, tied around their wrists, keeping them together, always. 

But Stiles wasn’t in a fanciful mood and Lydia wasn’t always tied to him, Scott and Alison weren’t always going to be around. Danny hugged him from behind, two giant tanned arms wrapped around his chest. It knocked Stiles off balance, when was the last time someone had hugged, held, him like that? Just because he was there in front of them, and not because he’d survived something else. Did this even count as surviving? Danny let him go and smiled his beautiful grin at him. Stiles couldn’t help but smile back. As Danny’s body engulfed Lydia, Stiles face fell and he ducked past a man doing high kicks on a table into an unknown room. 

+

Lydia found him on the balcony. He was leaning on the railing looking out over bonfire and the cars headlights that illuminated the people standing around it. The lights from below kept her from seeing his face, but his arms and shoulders and neck and head were bathed in a soft glow that made him look like so entirely human and something so much more all at once. 

Lydia felt a pull towards him. This figure, head bent down and shoulders sloped like they carried the whole universe. And, she supposed, in a way they did. It was always him understanding the threats, the world they had come to live in and the way they all fit into it. She looked for the young boy who couldn’t be coy about his feelings in the man in front of her. Lydia tried to remember the last time he had smiled at her just because he could. Tried to remember the last time he had told her a joke, or made some ridiculous comment just to get a rise out her over a long study session. She couldn’t remember the last time it had been just the two of them without anything else going on. In that moment Lydia wanted to be lying on his bed, red string forgotten on the floor, just talking to her friend. 

Stiles shoulders heaved and for a second Lydia thinks he’s crying, but he stilled. She took a moment, a jiffy really, to admire the man’s form, and then she went to him. She wraps her arms around his waist and tries to hold him how she’s needed to be held so many times before. In her arms, the man softens. From behind she imagined they looked quite romantic. Her heart clenched at the thought that someone could photograph them like this, so vulnerable and together. She wanted this to be theirs.

“Sometimes I can’t ask for comfort, no matter how much I need it. I’m here, Stiles. And I always will be.” 

Her cheek was pressed against his back and her body as close to his as she could get but not as close as she could stand. She would have been closer if it was physically possible. Stiles shoulders heaved again and the sigh reverberated through Lydia’s chest too. She didn’t know how long they stood there with the whole world moving around them but without really them being in it. Alison never came running, Scott never broke up a fight. The threat never came.  
When he was ready, Stiles turned around the held Lydia in his arms.


End file.
